Your Free Time, Reconsidered

Thinking about: Your life

Consider an American eighteen-year-old, let’s call her Olivia, who is about to enter college. She is faced with the question of how best to spend her college years. Among her options are studying, hanging out, and partying. It’s up to her to decide how much time to devote to each. If she’s going to college mainly to hang out and party, perhaps earning a degree along the way, what follows will likely be of little interest to her, but suppose her goal is instead to lay the foundation for a rewarding career. If this is the case, a bit of arithmetic is in order.

Suppose Olivia graduates from college at age 22. According to actuarial tables, she will probably live for 59 more years, to age 81. This is 516,840 hours, and if she sleeps eight hours a night, 344,560 of those hours will be spent in wakeful activity. Now imagine that Olivia goes on to have what used to be thought of as a traditional career, in which she works 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, until age 65. She will end up spending 86,000 of her 344,560 waking hours at work—25 percent of them. The other 75 percent will be spent doing other things, including personal care, driving, shopping, cooking, eating, recreational activities, and perhaps childcare and other family activities.

In college, Olivia will be required to take some courses, but she will also get to choose electives. The required courses will depend on what major she chooses. By taking them, she will be preparing for her career. Although the elective courses won’t be career-related, they can help her thrive as a human being during the three-out-of-four waking hours that she isn’t working. For this to happen, though, she must choose them thoughtfully.

Taking elective courses in the liberal arts, for example, can help her develop a philosophy of life. (I would love to plug philosophy at this point but, regrettably, much of what passes for philosophy—in the US, at any rate—is blissfully unconcerned with living a good life. An ethical life, yes; a good life, not so much.) She can also acquire general knowledge about how the world works by taking elective history and science courses. This general knowledge is important to anyone who wants to think rather than feel their way to conclusions. And not to be forgotten, she can cultivate tastes. I can appreciate art in large part because of the elective art history course I took. In retrospect, I wish I had also taken a course in poetry.

After college Olivia will, if things go as planned, have an abundance of leisure time. Yes, she can spend it playing Candy Crush on her phone—or worse, endlessly scrolling on TikTok—but that is the opposite of flourishing. The same can be said of falling into an opioid addiction.

Most of those reading this post won’t be 18-year-olds about to enter college. For these readers, the arithmetic will be different. Consider, for example, a woman, let’s call her Karen, who just retired at age 65. According to those same actuarial tables, she will probably live 20 more years, to age 85. If she sleeps 8 hours a night, she has 116,800 waking hours of life left, none of which will be spent working. That’s a lot of free time.

My advice to Karen is to keep track of how she is spending those precious hours and to spend some of those hours considering whether, in order to flourish rather than merely survive as a human being, there might be a better way to spend them. Maybe learn new things? Maybe acquire new skills and cultivate new tastes? Maybe develop a philosophy of life or improve her ability to deal with the setbacks that old age is likely to present? At this point, I can unhesitatingly put in a plug for Stoicism. For more on this, see my Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, along with my Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient.